There's something for everyone in this work. Latinos love the flat dimensions and gaudy colors (are shower curtain prints available?!). Surfers are flattered that maybe the Virgin Mary would pick up surfing if she were around today. Environmentalists love the irreverent use of Catholic iconography relegated to eco-friendly propaganda. And I like that this Patterson tool was fined $500.

The phrase "Latino community" is pure B.S. It implies something that doesn't exist. What does a black Brazilian who speaks Portuguese have in common with someone from northern New Mexico whose family has lived in that area for 250 years and speaks New Mexican Spanish, have in common?

Yeah after the bothersome Treaty of Tordesillas worked through a couple generations, there's hardly any difference between Tierra Del Fuego and Tierra Amarilla, Recife and Tijuana. One big homogenous culture represented by some dude in Encinitas.

OK, so an "artistic" lawbreaker who touched a cultural and religious cord in his community is willing to pay a reasonable financial penalty for his crime and will be given a second chance to do it right next time.

Personally hate the art, but hey, I'm a sucker for a story with a happy ending.

This is ridiculous. If somebody wants to go to the trouble of covering a surface with something reasonably aesthetic at their own expense, the city should have just pretended they couldn't see it and turned a deaf ear to complaints.

Here in Chickentown, USA, I was going to put up a mural depicting Our Lady of Guadalupe riding a chicken. It would unite our Latino community, business interests, and buy local food activists while promoting respect for fowl in a whimsical way. No one else liked the idea though, so I can only assume that we're a less progressive community.

It's a cool mural and that's about it. I'm not one to factor into whether the city of encinitas considers this graffiti, but if you know encinitas, it's basically a sleepy beach town with a lot of ex-hippies living in it. There is a famous stretch of beach there called Swami's after the Self Realization Fellowship Retreat that sits above it. It's basically a NewAge Temple. Most of encinitas covers the stretch of the 101 and there are bits of graffiti here and there that the city leaves alone.

I think the fact that this guy basically bolted it to a wall of a freeway underpass without a permit is what has caused him the grief, because the city was going to basically rip it off and destroy it.